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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
The Visiting Continues
Saturday. 4.1.06 1:41 am
The visit was excellent. There was a German with a red cowboy shirt and black leather pants and a mullet. There was another German with a large handlebar mustache that extended several inches beyond the edge of his face. He wore a cowboy-type belt. The Russians were fabulous. Sasha was old and peered through his glasses and talked about back when we were the Soviet Union. He’s been there since the beginning of Soviet exploration of Venus. Misha was a little bit more foreboding at first, but turned out to be jovial and kind. Sasha announced to Jim that the Russians would not give their talk together as it said on my schedule, but that he got to have me first and only after he was finished he would hand me off to Misha. Once he had gotten rid of Jim, he gave me the run-down on Venus, slowly speaking in a heavy but understandable Russian accent. At one point he turned around and hushed the other students in the room insistently, telling them loudly that he was giving me a very interesting lecture on the planet Venus and since I was a prospective student they all wanted me to come there and they should let him give his lecture in peace so that I could hear it and I would come.
I really enjoyed the company of the department geophysicist, whose name I always forget. We had a lovely conversation about superplumes in the mantle and whether or not they were responsible for resurfacing the planet Venus. I asked him whether he believe in a one or two-layered model of convection for the Earth. He had to think about it, he didn’t really know. We talked about the sequestering of neodymium 142 somewhere in the lower mantle, as is evidenced by its absence in crustal rocks. I am, of course, of the opinion that one-layer mantle convection is preposterous, but I’m just an undergraduate, after all. He made a compromise and said that he thought it had layers of convection, but just not in the places that we thought they were, or maybe just not in the traditional way people have always said that we have layers. He was charming and his office was a mess. His hopefulness reminded me of Bob from Wyoming, the lone student of Io. Sometimes astronomers and geophysicists get lonely, because they don’t have anyone to talk to who speaks their language… who thinks the same way that they do. Jim likes mapping areas and deciding their geological history based on which features overlap and how many craters are in the area. Eric is like him in that way.
After a really long day of talking to geologists, we retired to Jim’s house “for a drink before dinner”. Jean-Baptist, the visiting Frenchman who flatly refuses to be called "Johnny" by the Russians, volunteered to drink “wadka” with them, which is, according to Jim, almost always a mistake. But the Russian insisted that if we did not drink “wadka” with them, in their country of Russia this meant that we did not respect them and that we were not really friends with them. “Look at me I am drinking by myself! A real friend would never let someone drink by himself.” They gave me a shot of wadka in a tiny shot glass with the flag of Finland on it and taught me how to drink it in the proper Russian fashion. They offered me and the Frenchman more wadka, but I told them I only respected them as much as I respected the country of Finland and the Frenchman told them that he only really drank wine since he was a Frenchman, and they accepted both excuses with a round of laughter and another round of wadka for just themselves. Jim told us that he usually had to prep his students before a trip to Moscow with a warning about just this sort of Russian tomfoolery. They’ll start by offering you just a shot, in honor of your coming to Russia and in honor of it being your first time and being an American and the fact that they brought their best wadka for just this purpose and friendship and welcome it is difficult to say no. However, if you do not say no, it is VERy difficult to stop there. From here on out they call upon the basic tenets of human interaction- friendship, respect, loyalty, custom, tradition, good international relations, or anything else that crosses their minds. In order to decline the offer of a Russian, you have one of two options: First, as soon as you arrive at the bar, you can order a beer and drink at least half of it right away. Then, when the offer of wadka comes, you can express your dismay, but explain that you cannot possibly mix vodka and beer. This is something that a Russian can understand. The only other way is to tell them some Russian phrase I forget “preveosky” or something, which means, “If I start, I cannot stop.” This does not make sense to anyone besides the Russians. After the wadka and the California rolls we used “traditional Russian” chasers, we went off to a pub for more drinks. I decided that the vodka challenge was quite enough for a prospective student to take on, so here I opted for a glass of water with a lemon. I added a “for now” on the end of my order to deflect questions concerning whether or not I would have a beer. By the time I didn’t ever order a beer, they probably would be at a point where they wouldn’t notice anymore.

We waited in the pub interminably, trying to get seated. I had a burger and it was delicious, but charred on the outside. Jim regaled us with tales of Moscovian cockroaches, the most numerous cockroaches in all the world. Misha told us of the field camp he went to in Siberia. He was the cook for the people at the camp, so he had to lug around all of his pots and pans to their camp site. Once there he put all the pots and pans away in a cupboard and closed the cupboard. The following day he opened the door to find that every single pot and pan was covered with cockroaches so completely that you couldn’t even see the surface of the implements. As Misha said, “So thick I could not see through them!” So he shook them off and cooked breakfast because “what else could he do?”
Jim told us about a little brewery Sasha had taken him to one of the first times he visited the USSR. It was a little independent brewery and it had been shutdown for a while because of the government. The government people were watching over it now, and Sasha told Jim that he was an Estonian brewmaster who had come to learn the superior techniques of the Soviets to bring back to his lowly country of Estonia. There was only one rule for this farce: Jim couldn’t say a word. So they went into the brewery for a personal tour. They came upon the gigantic copper vats used for the actual brewing and Jim peered down into the vats. He wanted to know what was in them, because there seemed to be a layer of brown still at the bottom even though the vats had been emptied. He conveyed this to Sasha, who asked the guide to shine his light down into the vats. He did… and as it turned out, the vat was full of cockroaches. Millions upon millions of cockroachs!!

Apparently Jim tells these stories about the cockroaches in Russia all the time. Sasha has to retaliate by telling a story about when he first visited Houston and there were all sitting around in the hotel room when a giant Texan cockroach went strolling across the floor (and everything is bigger in Texas). “Aha!” cried Sasha, “There are cockroaches in America! You cannot make fun of me anymore!” and Jim said, “oh, Sasha, look, it is a cockroach you have brought from Moscow with you!”

One time Jim had brought a famous Russian scientist to visit Houston, and he put him up in a really nice hotel. He brought him in and the man went into the restroom, and then came out and said, “there is no water, the water doesn’t turn on” and Jim said, “that’s ridiculous” and went in and tried the faucet and the water still didn’t turn on and he said, “I guess there’s no water!” and the man said appreciatively, “Ah! Just like Russia!!” Jim: it was really embarrassing.

They kept on joking with the Frenchman and offering him wine and being completely perplexed when he didn’t want any. They seemed to think that all Frenchmen thought about was wine and drinking it. He proved them right when he was completely horrified when Sasha poured water into his wine during dinner. The Frenchman said, “You pour water in your wine?” and Sasha said, “Yes!” and the Frenchman said, “NON!” and Sasha said, “Yes!” and the Frenchman said, “NON!” Sasha told him that in ancient Greece only slaves drank wine without water in it. The Frenchman said if that was the case then he would be a slave. Sasha poured some more water in the wine.
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